It would appear that Adobe is finally beginning to move on with a program called Moxi they licensed from Dr Nelson Chu in September 2006. If you need more info on that program and the capabilities it brings to digital watercolor, check out these links:

I have been following the advancement of this program since it was previewed by Dr. Chu in 2006. The speculation has been for some time that Adobe had squashed the program, which really didn't make any sense.

Emulating watercolor with a computer is perhaps the biggest "digital art" challenge of all simply because watercolor does not behave as any other medium behaves. I have spent a full six months (minimum) trying to emulate water color using Painter. Part of that time included attending water color classes just so I could understand the complexities.

In spite of Corel's somewhat extravagant claims, it just isn't up to the task; it cannot emulate the blooms and backruns one encounters with watercolor, nor can it reproduce the sedimentation that is characteristic of certain paints (French Ultramarine, for example). Forget washes! And almost all the books by the "experts" rarely touch on (or completely ignore) Painter's watercolor capabilities (or lack thereof).

I was able to get a copy of Dr. Chu's program in 2007. It was (is) very buggy and crashed often, but when it worked, it rendered watercolor at a level far exceeding anything else I've found on the open market. I suspect Adobe has spent the intervening 2 years debugging the code and polishing the user interface. I hope so.

Corel (and others) have had the opportunity to advance the possibilities in this area. Watercolor algorithms require CPU and graphics cards that can handle intensive computations; both of which have been increasingly available for several years and we've had only mediocre software in this area. Let's see what Adobe can do.

Oh, WOW. Thanks for the links, Dogwatch! I'm excited. Seeing this and Danny's posts about new painting technology proposed for PSCS7 is wonderful. Digital painting is an area long ignored by Adobe in recent updates. I'm anxious to get my PS brush "wet" and dig in!